Northern Ireland National Team Songs: From We’re Not Brazil to Will Grigg’s on Fire

The Green and White Army are one of international football’s great travelling parties and for a good while now they have been praised for it as much as for anything the team has done on the pitch. Northern Ireland spent the spring of 2026 coming to terms with another near miss, beaten by Italy in a World Cup play-off semi-final in March and left to watch the finals in America, Canada and Mexico from home. The statue of George Best still stands outside the National Football Stadium at Windsor Park, and the songbook has not lost a note.

That songbook is worth writing about, because it is almost entirely self-made, often very funny and completely its own. A quick word on what this is and is not. These are the songs of the Northern Ireland football team, sung by the Green and White Army at Windsor Park and on the road and they are a separate tradition from the all-Ireland rugby anthems you might be half-remembering. There is no Ireland’s Call in here. What follows is not the complete songbook and a few of the more colourful player chants are best left in the ground, but these are the ones worth writing about.

Image: Tadeáš Bednarz, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

We’re Not Brazil, We’re Northern Ireland

If Northern Ireland have an unofficial anthem, this is it, and it tells you everything about how the support sees itself. Set to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic and written by a fan named Stewart McAfee, it takes the country’s knack for the heroic failure and turns it into a punchline the whole ground is in on. The joke is funny because it is true and because the fans would rather sing about not being Brazil than pretend to be anything they are not. The heart of it never changes:

We’re not Brazil, we’re Northern Ireland,
We’re not Brazil, we’re Northern Ireland,
We’re not Brazil, we’re Northern Ireland,
But it’s all the same to me.

Green and White Army

Underneath all of it is the two-word chant the whole support is named after. Green and White Army is less a song than a heartbeat, the thing that starts up in the concourses before kick-off and comes back whenever the singing needs somewhere to reset. It carries more weight than a simple nickname chant might otherwise do, because this is a support that has spent the better part of twenty years rebuilding its reputation through the Irish FA’s Football for All work, turning Windsor Park from a ground with a difficult past into one of the more welcoming nights on the international calendar.

The chant is the sound of that decision, thousands of people who have agreed that the whole point is to enjoy it whilst they can:

Green and White Army!
Green and White Army!
Green and White Army!

Sweet Caroline

Neil Diamond’s old singalong has been claimed by half of football in the last few years and England in particular took it up during their run to the Euro 2020 final, but Northern Ireland were belting it out at Windsor Park long before that and the supporters will tell you so at length. It has no connection to the football beyond the fact that it is impossible not to join in with, which is exactly the point. The opening bars go up, the arms go up with them and the ground answers back on the part everybody waits for:

So good! So good! So good!

Michael, Give Us a Wave

Most managers have to settle for a song about their tactics. Michael O’Neill got a song that only really worked if he played along and, to his credit, he usually did. It dates from his first spell in charge, the one that took Northern Ireland to the Euro 2016 finals for the first time in thirty years, and it survived his return to the job because the crowd never stopped being fond of him. The idea is simple, and the payoff is the great roar that went up when the man in the technical area turned round and obliged:

Michael, Michael, give us a wave,
Michael, give us a wave!

Away in a Manger

This is the one that nobody outside Windsor Park would see coming. The crowd starts up the old Christmas carol, straight and sweet and note for note, right up until the last line, which is where it swerves into a tribute to David Healy, the country’s record goalscorer with 36 for his nation. Healy is sung about here for one night above all others, the seventh of September 2005, when he ran onto a Steven Davis pass and scored the only goal to beat a star-packed England side of David Beckham, Wayne Rooney and Steven Gerrard at Windsor Park in a World Cup qualifier.

You hear the carol less often than you used to, but if Northern Ireland are playing a match during the Christmas period then you can bet your bottom dollar that it will be brought out accordingly:

Away in a manger,
No crib for a bed,
The little Lord Jesus
Lay down his sweet head…
Healy! Healy! Healy!

Will Grigg’s on Fire

No Northern Ireland songbook could close anywhere else. During the summer of 2016, a Wigan supporter named Sean Kennedy put new words to Gala’s dance track Freed From Desire in honour of the striker Will Grigg. The Green and White Army soon adopted it during international games and within weeks it had escaped the internet and taken over the bars and squares of France as Northern Ireland made the knockout stages of a European Championship for the first time. The strangest part was that Grigg never actually got on the pitch during the tournament.

That, of course, only made the fans sing it louder. It has never quite gone away since, in spite of the fact that Grigg certainly has, so it remains the sound of the best summer the modern support has had:

Will Grigg’s on fire,
Your defence is terrified!
Will Grigg’s on fire…
Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah…

That is the trick the whole Northern Ireland songbook pulls off, really. A team that reached the Euro 2016 finals and has spent most of the years since falling agonisingly short, the latest of them in that play-off against Italy, has a set of songs that sound like a party either way. The Green and White Army worked out a long time ago that the singing does not depend on the scoreline and, on the current evidence, they are in no danger of forgetting it.